Proud to say Georgia

Since 1851, 25 governors of Georgia have been graduates of Georgia. At least 17 UGA alumni are presidents or provosts of colleges and universities in the U.S. Nine UGA graduates have received the Pulitzer Prize. Four UGA alumni have been elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

Undergraduate Admissions

The University of Georgia is a national leader among public universities in the numbers of major scholarships earned by our students. We have had eight Rhodes Scholars since 1995. In the same period, our students have won 49 Goldwater Scholarships. UGA students have earned 12 Truman Scholarships since 1995, and each year we have multiple recipients of major national scholarships.

Graduate Admissions

Continuing Education

Whether you are looking for personal improvement, seeking a credential or wanting to change your career path, the University of Georgia Center for Continuing
Education delivers a variety of educational programs to meet your learning needs.

International Students

The University of Georgia has approximately 180 International Cooperative Agreements (ICAs) in over 50 countries. These agreements allow for the formal
development of activities such as faculty and student exchanges, collaborative research, seminars and workshops, and/or service programs.

Research at UGA

The Office of the Vice President for Research encourages and supports UGA research, scholarship and creative activities by assisting with the recruitment of research-intensive faculty, and providing infrastructure for sponsored research. We help to move UGA innovations into the marketplace, encourage research-based economic development, and ensure responsible conduct in research.

Centers & Institutes

UGA research addresses real-life problems, including the grand challenges associated with water, food, fuel, environment and health. It also enriches the soul through the arts, humanities and social sciences. OVPR's Interdisciplinary centers, institutes and research initiatives provide enhanced interactions and focus on advanced areas of research.

Student and Postdoctoral Research

Undergraduate students, graduate students and postdoctoral scholars are critical to the successful pursuit of research and scholarship at the University of Georgia. They contribute in multiple ways to research and scholarship in the physical, life and social sciences, as well as the arts and humanities.

PSO Units

For more than 80 years, PSO has led the University in bringing its resources to each of Georgia’s 159 counties, 500+ cities, and around the world, serving more than 110,000 individuals annually to improve the quality of life in Georgia and beyond.

Service-Learning

The University of Georgia has been recognized by the Carnegie Foundation for its institutional commitment to community engagement through teaching, research, and public service with the Community Engagement Classification. UGA was one of only 115 colleges and universities to achieve this elective classification in 2010 and joined the ranks of only 311 institutions nationally.

Campus Life

Student Affairs is a primary point of contact for students through more than 600 registered student organizations; student programming groups; social
fraternities and sororities; student leadership programs and volunteer services; and international and multicultural programs.

Health & Recreation

The 440,000-square-foot Bernard B. and Eugenia A. Ramsey Student Center for Physical Activities is one of the largest and most comprehensive fitness/exercise facilities for students and faculty in the country.

Get Involved

In 2000, UGA was the first university in the nation to organize a collegiate Relay For Life. It raised more than $115,000. UGA Relay now has over 3,200 student volunteers and has raised more than $2.3 million, benefiting The American Cancer Society.

Academic Units

Students and faculty pursue arts studies in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences. The Special Collections Libraries provide access to materials related to the history and culture of Georgia, while the Willson Center and ICE promote Interdisciplinary inquiry and creative activity in the arts.

About UGA

Researchers make fuel production breakthrough

The promise of affordable transportation fuels from biomass - a sustainable, carbon-neutral route to American energy independence - has been left perpetually on hold by the economics of the conversion process. New research from the University of Georgia has overcome this hurdle, allowing the direct conversion of switchgrass to fuel.

The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, documents the direct conversion of biomass to biofuel without pretreatment, using the engineered bacterium Caldicellulosiruptor bescii.

Pretreatment of the biomass feedstock-nonfood crops such as switchgrass and miscanthus-is the step of breaking down plant cell walls before fermentation into ethanol. This pretreatment step has long been the economic bottleneck hindering fuel production from lignocellulosic biomass feedstocks.

Janet Westpheling, a professor in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences department of genetics, and her team of researchers-all members of U.S. Department of Energy-funded BioEnergy Science Center in which UGA is a key partner-succeeded in genetically engineering the organism C. bescii to deconstruct un-pretreated plant biomass.

"Given a choice between teaching an organism how to deconstruct biomass or teaching it how to make ethanol, the more difficult part is deconstructing biomass," said Westpheling, who spent two and a half years developing genetic methods for manipulating the C. bescii bacterium to make the current work possible.

The UGA research group engineered a synthetic pathway into the organism, introducing genes from other anaerobic bacterium that produce ethanol, and constructed a pathway in the organism to produce ethanol directly.

"Now, without any pretreatment, we can simply take switchgrass, grind it up, add a low-cost, minimal salts medium and get ethanol out the other end," Westpheling said. "This is the first step toward an industrial process that is economically feasible."

The recalcitrance of plant biomass for the production of fuels, a resistance to microbial degradation evolved in plants over millions of years, results from their rigid cell walls that have been the key to their survival and the major impediment to biofuel production. Understanding the scientific basis of, and ultimately eliminating recalcitrance as a barrier has been the core mission of the BioEnergy Science Center.

"To take a virtually unknown and uncharacterized organism and engineer it to produce a biofuel of choice within the space of a few years is a towering scientific achievement for Dr. Westpheling's group and for BESC," said Paul Gilna, director of the BioEnergy Science Center, headquartered at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. "It is a true reflection of the highly collaborative research we have built within BESC, which, in turn, has led to accelerated accomplishments such as this."

Caldicellulosiruptor bacteria have been isolated around the world - from a hot spring in Russia to Yellowstone National Park. Westpheling explained that many microbes in nature demonstrate prized capabilities in chemistry and biology but that developing the genetic systems to use them is the most significant challenge.

"Systems biology allows for the engineering of artificial pathways into organisms that allow them to do things they cannot do otherwise," she said.

Ethanol is but one of the products the bacterium can be taught to produce. Others include butanol and isobutanol (transportation fuels comparable to ethanol), as well as other fuels and chemicals-using biomass as an alternative to petroleum.

"This is really the beginning of a platform for manipulating organisms to make many products that are truly sustainable," she said.

Westpheling's co-authors on the paper are Daehwan Chung and Minseok Cha of the Franklin College department of genetics and Adam M. Guss of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. All authors are members of the DOE BioEnergy Science Center headquartered at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, Tennessee. BESC is a U.S. Department of Energy Bioenergy Research Center supported by the DOE Office of Science.